Daybreak (58 page)

Gwen glared around the wreckage, eyes sharp behind her paint. “What in Fate’s name happened?” she whispered after a moment.

“I’m not sure, my Thane.” Silas crouched before one of the bodies and jabbed its head with his fingers. “These men have the look of those long-dead, but not the smell of them. It’s strange.”

Shamus knew full well what these men were — and more troubling than that, he knew who they belonged to. No amount of grog could’ve drowned the memories of the Endless Plains. There was a darkness in Gilderick’s realm the likes of which he’d never seen.

Now, that darkness had found its way here. Why? He wasn’t sure. But just the thought of it chilled him.
 

“Search the chambers,” Gwen said quietly. “See if anyone survived.”

A handful of wildmen peeled off to follow Silas. They stayed close together as they went, and their legs carried them stiffly.

There was an arc of bodies upon the grand room floors. They were mostly those dead-looking fellows, though they found one that was crushed beyond telling — and another that chilled Shamus again.

“Tide take me,” he whispered. 

He was careful as he pulled the body of a woman off the floor. The woman’s head was smashed, her golden-brown waves stained with red, her features frozen in the soft embrace of death.

Still, Shamus could hardly breathe. “Countess D’Mere?”

Gwen crouched beside him. “I’m sorry. Was she your friend?”

“No, I didn’t know her well.” He pressed two fingers against her neck, but only the cold answered him. “It’s just strange, is all — to see someone you knew sprawled out like this. No matter who they were in life, you can’t help but feel a bit … sorry for them, in death.”

Gwen reached over and closed D’Mere’s eyes, her mouth drawn tightly. “Come on, shipbuilder. Let’s find the captain.”

Before they’d even made it out the rampart doors, they heard Lysander yelling:

“You should’ve listened to me, Red! I told you to bloody well duck. I told you to get down. You followed my orders every day for eight years — you never once ignored me. And this is the day you chose to turn. You should have listened!”

Those last words came out as a scream — a cry that broke across the waves and sent Shamus into a run. Gwen followed so closely behind that she nearly flattened him when he stopped.

Thelred lay still in Lysander’s arms. A gash split the front of his head and spilled down his face. It blackened at his eyes, as if they’d been sealed shut by the gore. A bloodied spear lay beside him — its head matched the hole in the top of his shoulder. The wooden leg was shattered, nothing more than a handful of splinters at the base of his knee.

His clothes were torn; his flesh was bruised and swollen. Lysander screamed at him, but his face stayed fixed, and still.

Horribly, terribly still …

“Oh, Fate,” Shamus whispered. “I’m sorry, Captain. I’m so sorry.”

“What are you sorry about?” Lysander snapped. His eyes burned and veins bulged from his neck. “He can hear me. He knows what I’m saying — don’t you, Red? You’re in an under-realm’s worth of trouble.”

“Captain, he can’t —”

“Shut up!” Lysander cried. He held Thelred tighter as Shamus crouched, as if he feared his body would be taken away. “You don’t know him like I do. You don’t know anything at all.”

He was right about that. Shamus had no clue what to say. When he looked to Gwen for help, he saw she’d wandered off. Eveningwing was perched upon the rampart walls. His eyes were squinched at their bottoms and his feathers ruffled miserably. He stepped onto Gwen’s arm when she offered, and she carried him away.

It was probably for the best. Shamus didn’t think a young fellow should have to see a thing like this.

“You should’ve listened,” Lysander moaned again. His voice climbed when he pressed his face into Thelred’s bloodied hair. “You should have listened to me, you idiot! Now you’ve given me no choice — I’m going to lock you in the brig for a month! Do you hear me, Red? A
month
!”

He’d turned the corner, now. Shamus knew if he didn’t do something quick, the captain would drive himself mad. He’d reached to pull him away when a hand rose between them. It was bloodstained and bruised; it trembled as it held up its fingers.

And then a voice rasped:
 

“Two … weeks …”

Shamus nearly fell backwards when Thelred opened his eyes. “Seas and serpents!”

“I told you,” Lysander said as his glare melted into to relief. “I told you he could hear me. He was just trying to knock a little time off his punishment … and it worked.” He laughed and clutched Thelred’s hand tightly. “Fine — two weeks.”
 

*******

There’d been more to the castle siege than they realized. Thelred talked the whole trip to the village, but Shamus still didn’t understand it. Countess D’Mere, Lord Gilderick, and Midlan had collided — all over some sort of poison. The army that went down with the bridge was Gilderick’s. Thelred swore they’d all been killed: either by fire or sea.

But almost all of the bodies strewn throughout the village belonged to Midlan.

“Tide take me,” Shamus said again at the sight of the battle. 

Corpses clad in gold-tinged armor were scattered across the street and all along the alleyways. They coated the shop floors. It looked as if a stormwind had burst from the skies and torn them all to pieces. Midlan lay scattered and broken around them.

The pirates and fisherfolk had begun piling the bodies up to burn. But the wildmen’s arrival sped things up — well, mostly. The craftsmen seemed taken with the armor’s color, and reluctant to toss it away.

“This is good steel. We could make all sorts of things out of this,” one of them said, as he crushed a gauntlet with his bare hands. The metal crumpled between his fingers like parchment. He passed a grin around the others. “We should keep some of it — just in case.” 

Lysander frowned at them. “You already have rocks from the Valley, and all of those blasted shells you found in Harborville. There’s no way you’ll be able to make something out of all of it.”

“They can keep whatever they can carry,” Gwen said, waving a hand at them. “Those are the rules.”

Shamus watched in amazement as the craftsmen went about gleefully packing things into the warriors’ rucksacks — crushing whole plates of armor into balls to make them fit. “They’ll be dragging their boots, trying to haul all of those bits and baubles around.”

The swirling lines of Gwen’s paint creased together with her sharp grin. “My warriors will run out of
space
before they run out of strength.”

There wasn’t a true healer among them, but one of the fisherfolk knew enough about herbs and stitching to patch Thelred up. The worst mark on him was the gash across his face — but, thanks to a few tankards of pirate grog, Thelred didn’t seem to feel a thing.

“Do you remember Greenblood?” he said, his words already getting a bit slurred.

Lysander had gotten a tankard of his own — in what he’d sworn was merely a showing of moral support. Now, he nearly choked on his laugh. “Of course I remember! It took us weeks to find a route through all of those bothersome islands. There were supposed to be mountains of gold locked up inside their middle.”

“Never saw so much as a glittering speck,” Thelred lamented. His chin fell to his chest — and the sudden jerk snapped the fisherman’s needle from his string.  

“Stop fidgeting,” he grunted as he tied it on again.

“But we found something far better, didn’t we?” Lysander said with a grin.

Jonathan — who’d very quickly insisted that
two
moral supporters were far better than one — swung up from his tankard in interest. “What was it?”

“The biggest cellar we’ve ever seen! Shelves upon shelves of dark, dusty bottles just waiting to be cracked.” Thelred swooped an arm out to the side in a gesture that toppled him over — and broke the string again.

The fisherman cursed as he righted him. “If he wants it sealed properly, he’s going to have to hold
still
.”

“It’ll all work out, I’m sure,” Lysander said with an impatient wave. He smiled at his cousin’s uncharacteristically silly grin. “Tell him what we did with it, Red.”

“Stuffed as many bottles that would fit down our trousers and in our coat pockets, grabbed another armful apiece and ran like mad.”

“What?” Jonathan looked more concerned now than when he’d been hanging upside down. “You left the rest behind? Why didn’t you pack it all in your ship?”

Thelred leaned forward to answer — nearly popping the string again. But all at once, his face fell. He whipped around to Lysander, his brows bent in confusion. “Yeah, why didn’t we?”

By this point, the captain looked close to bursting. His grin could’ve split into laughter at any moment. He propped a hand against his mouth and whispered loudly: “You were in prison.”

“Because I was in prison,” Thelred said, whipping back to Jonathan. He didn’t seem to notice when the needle popped out of the fisherman’s hand and
thwap
ed him in the side of the face.

Jonathan’s brows rose high. “Really? What’d they lock you up for?”

“Fraternizing with a manager’s daughter. He wasn’t at all pleased to find her wrapped around a pirate — locked him away and swore he’d ship him off to Reginald the next morning for a swift execution.”

“That was your fault,” Thelred insisted, thrusting a finger at Lysander. “You were the one who spent half the night chasing that blasted woman.”

“Yes, but
you
were the one who caught her,” Lysander said with a wink.

Thelred’s frown went slightly muddled, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he should actually be indignant. “Well, I only caught her because she threw herself at me.”

“Women love him,” Lysander explained with a loud whisper. “There must be something about a man with a scowl. I’ll never understand it.”

“It’s the mystery of it all, mate. And I’m sure that hard-set jaw doesn’t hurt things, either.” Jonathan pinched Thelred’s chin. He tried to swat the fiddler’s hand away, but wound up knocking the fisherman aside, instead.

“If I have to tell you to hold still one more t —” 

“If I hadn’t caught her, she would’ve fallen off the roof!” Thelred shouted over the fisherman’s rant.

“The roof?” Jonathan wagged his brows. “A bit of starlight, a summer’s breeze. I don’t know, mate — that sounds awfully romantic to me.”

Thelred lunged for him. “It was
not
roman —!”

“Enough! I can’t do anything while you’re squirming about.” The fisherman shoved him back and snapped his fingers at a passing wildwoman. “Come here and hold him still, will you? Don’t let his head move an inch.”

The wildwoman wore her red hair in a short braid across her shoulder, and her paint made it look like a monster’s claw had scraped across her face. She paused — and gave Thelred a long look. “All right,” she said finally.
 

Though he slurred his protests, the wildwoman sat behind him and pulled him straight against her chest. She kept one hand beneath his chin and wound the other through his hair.

“I don’t need coddling,” he grouched.

She smiled at his glare. “I’m not coddling you — this is how you hold a man when you mean to slit his throat.” Her finger brushed along the ridges of his neck. “See? Just like this.”

Thelred’s glare sharpened. “Try anything like that, and I’ll gut you, savage.”

She laughed … and held him tighter.

Jonathan gaped at them from over his tankard.
What’s happening
? he mouthed to Lysander.

“Magic,” he said back, grinning as he shook his head. “Pure, untarnished magic.”

At that moment, Gwen happened by. Her gaze narrowed upon the wildwoman. “Don’t even think about it, Lydia. He’s taken enough of a beating already.”

“Yes, Warchief,” she mumbled.

“I’m going to take a walk around the edge of the village,” Gwen said, after another pointed glare at Lydia. “My wildmen should behave while I’m gone — if not, I’ll clobber them when I get back.”

“Mind if I come along with you, lass?” Shamus said, getting to his feet. “My legs could use a stretch. They’ve gone stiff.”

Her brows rose for a moment — so slightly that he wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it. Then they snapped back down. “Fine.”

She set a brisk pace for the woods outside the village. Gwen walked like she had rocks sewn into the heels of her boots: they clomped so loudly that men several paces away moved aside, as if they’d thought she was right behind him.

Shamus didn’t notice her being quiet until the noise of the village fell off. Then his ears began to ring. “Lovely night, isn’t it?”

She frowned at the setting sun. “It’s not night yet.”

“All right — evening, then,” Shamus amended. “What do you think of the seas?”

“It’s hot.”

“Aye, some days it is. But there’s most always a cool wind blowing from somewhere — you’ve just got to know which way to turn your head.”

“I’d rather have the cold all around me.”

Shamus chuckled. “Well, the only way you’re likely to find that around here is if you strip down to nothing.”

“I’d planned to,” she said smoothly. “Then you asked to come along.”

Shamus couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. Fortunately, Silas turned up before he had to think of something to say.

He swept out from the brush, wearing his lion skin and with a large rabbit clamped between his jaws. He dropped his kill at Gwen’s boots. The rumbling in Silas’s throat grew to a contented growl when she reached down to scratch his ears.

All at once, Silas’s head turned and he slunk forward. He began pacing back and forth, eyes shining on the woods in front of them … and there was suddenly nothing at all content about his growl.

After a moment, lights began popping up through the trees — faint little orange spots.

“Torchlight,” Gwen muttered. She snapped her fingers sharply. “Get to the village — warn the others.”

For half a moment, Shamus thought she’d been talking to him. Then a wildman dropped from the trees before him and broke into a soft-footed sprint down the road. “How long had he been up there?”